Delhi Rape: The Role of ‘Timepass’

Indian women travel in the women’s compartment of a train, Mumbai, Jan. 10.

Like any complex social phenomenon, violence against women is the result of many factors that aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

In the case of India, some commentators have pointed to a clash between “old” and “new,” tradition versus modernity. I have pointed to several factors, including an archaic legal system that puts the victim on trial as much as the perpetrator and altogether excludes marital rape. There’s also the potential impact of a skewed sex ratio, which research suggests is correlated with violence.

Underneath all of this is a society and culture that retains a big patriarchal and misogynistic streak. Little else could explain the bizarre comments from local authorities throughout India, such as advising schoolgirls to wear overcoats or telling women to go directly home after work.

Last month’s brutal gang rape of a young woman on a moving bus in Delhi has brought attention to the problem of violence against women. The particular circumstances of this tragedy turned the spotlight on public safety and the status of women primarily in India’s large metros. But violence against women is ubiquitous in India and can take many forms.

Five years ago, Laxmi Orang, a 17-year-old student from Assam, was participating in a peaceful protest to press for greater rights for the northeastern state’s Adivasi (tribal) community and tea plantation workers. According to news reports she and others with her were set upon by a mob.

Ms. Orang ended up being stripped, kicked in her genitals and paraded naked by a group of young men in front of television cameras that were on the scene to film the protest. Unlike the young woman in the Delhi tragedy, Ms. Orang survived her ordeal. But she is yet to receive justice.

Violence against women, whether urban or rural, or perpetrated by an acquaintance or stranger, mob or an individual, doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Ms. Orang’s case also demonstrates that violence against women often — though not always — intersects with violence against underprivileged and vulnerable groups. These can be defined along lines of caste, religion, ethnicity or geography.

An important piece of the social context underlying violence, particularly against women, has received scant attention, despite being evident to even the most casual visitor to India. Where in India don’t you see knots of idle young men lounging and loitering about?

Sometimes they’re innocuous enough, chatting or playing cards at a local tea stall. Yet other times, they’re molesting or harassing women passersby, behavior that still goes under the euphemism of “Eve-teasing.”

Prior to luring the young woman and her male companion onto the bus, the alleged perpetrators in last month’s attack were basically lounging about partying with food and drink. And the fateful bus ride began as a “joyride”.

India’s youthful population is often portrayed as a “demographic dividend.” Young people will become the workers of tomorrow and drive India’s economic rise, so the story goes. But the dark side of this tale is the presence of large numbers of uneducated or poorly educated young men who are, in many cases, unemployed or underemployed, unmarried and frustrated. The skewed sex ratio makes this problem worse. There are lots of idle young men.

Data show that youth unemployment in India was 9.9% for men and 11.3% for women in 2010, much higher than the overall unemployment rate of 3.8%. Clearly, young people are over represented among the pool of unemployed.

These statistics mask a much bigger problem, because many people who call themselves employed are in fact self-employed or underemployed, usually working in the informal sector, say as a roadside hawker or vendor. Even some people employed in the formal sector, such as building watchmen, lift operators, and the army of “assistants” that everyone from waiters to gym attendants seem to have, are stuck in low income, low productivity jobs with little or no prospect of career advancement.

These people are labeled as employed by the statistics, but they have lots of time on their hands, in many cases away from family and friends in their village, and with little money in their pockets.

There’s ample evidence from the U.S. and other Western countries of a robust correlation between unemployment and violent crime. This is no mere statistical artifact: studies do establish that there’s often a cause and effect relationship between higher unemployment and more crime.

While we don’t have comparable reliable studies for India, there’s a wealth of ethnographic research by anthropologists and other scholars documenting the link between idleness and the propensity to commit antisocial behavior, including crime, at the level of individual communities. One example is “Timepass,” a book by Oxford geographer Craig Jeffrey that documents exactly this in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh state. The Indian slang timepass refers to whiling away the time doing something not terribly productive, such as loafing with your buddies on a street corner or hanging out at a mall.

These ethnographic studies are backed up by a body of feminist and critical theory that draws a link between perceptions of “masculinity” and the threat of violence against women. Put simply, a young man who believes he hasn’t lived up to his potential and is either unemployed or stuck in a dead-end job, might think this reflects detrimentally on his identity as a man. The resulting frustration and anger may boil over into violence against women or other violent crimes.

In Mr. Jeffrey’s study, some young women reported feeling threatened and intimidated by the “ostentatious idleness” of some of the young men hanging around their college campus, making lewd remarks or “explicit sexual overtures.” One female student told Mr. Jeffrey that parts of her campus and the surrounding area were basically out of bounds because of such men.

We’ll probably never know what drove the alleged perpetrators of last month’s assault in Delhi, nor what tipped what might have been a relatively innocuous “joyride” into a horrific crime. We’re also unlikely to ever know the underlying roots of the fury and rage that drove the mob that attacked and brutalized Ms. Orang.

However, if these men had something more productive to do than “timepass,” maybe these tragedies and others like them might not have occurred.

Rupa Subramanya writes Economics Journal for India Real Time and is co-author of “Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India,” published by Random House India. You can follow her on Twitter @RupaSubramanya.

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